


The Girl, The Boy, The Well

by coralysendria



Category: Original Work
Language: English
Status: Completed
Published: 2015-10-25
Updated: 2015-10-25
Packaged: 2018-04-28 03:41:35
Rating: General Audiences
Warnings: Creator Chose Not To Use Archive Warnings
Chapters: 1
Words: 1,195
Publisher: archiveofourown.org
Story URL: https://archiveofourown.org/works/5076427
Author URL: https://archiveofourown.org/users/coralysendria/pseuds/coralysendria
Summary: <blockquote class="userstuff">
              <p>When Alyson falls into an abandoned well, she is surprised to find that she's not the first....</p>
            </blockquote>





	The Girl, The Boy, The Well

When Alyson opened her eyes, she found a blonde boy crouched next to her. He was wearing a red shirt with narrow horizontal stripes of yellow and blue, tan shorts and funny-looking sneakers, the kind her mom called "bo-bos," that were all canvas with a narrow strip of rubber all the way around.

"Hullo," he said. "Are you okay?"

She sat up slowly. "Uh-huh. What happened?"

"You fell."

Alyson followed the boy's gaze upward and saw, far overhead, the opening through which she had fallen. She scrambled to her feet in dismay. Even at her age, she knew to be relieved that the long-abandoned well was dry. "But how do we get out?"

"Oh, don't worry. My dog went for help. Someone should be coming soon." He squinted up at the light. "Though she's been gone a really long time."

"What's your name?" Alyson asked, sitting back down on the cold ground. She was really sore, probably from the fall, and it was better than standing.

"Tim." The boy joined her. "What's your's?"

"Alyson. Do you live around here?"

"Sort of. There aren't very many houses around here. I was out exploring when I fell."

Alyson looked at the boy oddly. Not very many houses? This field was at the edge of a new subdivision. Maybe he was used to living in the city.

"Where do you go to school?"

"Oh, there's no school right now," the boy answered. "It's summer! That's how come I was out exploring."

"I was exploring, too," Alyson said. "We just moved here from Vermont." She looked around at the walls. They were earthen and crumbling, but she might be able to climb out. "Have you tried climbing the walls?"

The boy shook his head. "I tried a while ago. I couldn't get to the top."

Alyson looked scornfully at the boy. She noticed that his sneakers were very clean. If he'd tried to climb the wall, why weren't the toes of his white sneakers dirty? She stood up again and looked at the walls. There was a rock, there, that might do as a foothold...she hoisted herself up to it. She wasn't tall enough to put her back against one wall and her legs against another as she'd seen someone do in an action show on TV, but maybe she could scale the walls like the rock wall at the sporting goods store where her mom used to take her on Saturdays.

She looked around and spotted another rock and reached for it. And she could put her toe there.... It took a long while and there were one or two bad moments when rocks pulled out under her fingers and showered her face with dirt, but she kept going -- especially when she got so near the top that she could feel the breeze going by. At last, she reached out of the well and pulled herself up. She lay for a moment, breathing heavily and gazing at the sky, then rolled over on her belly. A long way down, she could see Tim standing and looking up at her. 

"Climb up!" she called.

He shook his head. "I can't. Anyway, I have to wait for my dog."

Alyson heaved a sigh. What a wuss. "Okay. I'll bring my mom back."

Despite being sore all over, Alyson ran home and straight into her mother's office. She really wasn't supposed to be in there, but this was important.

Her mother looked up from her computer with her scolding look on, but her expression changed when she took in her daughter's muddy, bruised condition. "Good lord, Alyson! What happened to you?"

"I fell down a well when I was exploring, Mum. Come quick -- there's a boy still down there. He wouldn't climb up with me."

"A boy?"

"Yeah! He was already down there; he said that he'd sent his dog for help. Please, Mum! He wouldn't climb out with me."

Alyson's mother sighed and pushed back her chair. "All right, Alyson. But if this is one of your stories...." Her voice trailed off warningly.

Alyson grabbed the roll of clothesline from the garage; her dad hadn't had a chance to hang it yet. "To get Tim out," she said, when her mom looked at her funny. 

She led the way across the field to the gaping hole she'd fallen into; she could see the splintered, rotten bits of the well-cover and pointed them out to her mother.

"Why didn't you stay away, then?" her mother asked.

"The grass was grown up over them, Mom." She cautiously went over to the hole; she didn't want to fall in again. "Tim!"

She looked down, but couldn't see her fellow inmate. "Tim!"

There was no reply. She looked at her mother, who was standing with her arms crossed. "I swear, Mom! He was there! I fell down there and there he was!"

Her mother's face softened. "Well, I can certainly believe that you fell down there. You look battered enough. But, honey, there's no one down there, now. Maybe help came. Do you know his last name?"

Alyson shook her head. "He didn't tell me. He just said that he'd sent his dog for help, but that she'd been gone a long time."

"Well there's definitely no one down there, now, Alyson. Come on home. I need to call Mrs. Warner about this well, anyway."

When they got back to the house, Alyson's mom sent her to the bathroom to get cleaned up. "I should take you to see a doctor," she said.

"Aw, Mom, I'm okay," Alyson protested. "I just need to get cleaned up."

"All right," her mother said. "If you need me, I'll be in the office. I'm going to call Mrs. Warner."

A little later, when Alyson was soaking in the bubbles in the bathtub, there was a knock on the bathroom door and her mom came in and sat on the closed lid of the toilet. She had a strange look on her face.

"What is it, Mom?"

"You said that boy's name was Tim?"

"Yeah."

"Mrs. Warner just told me the strangest story. She said that forty or fifty years ago, back when this area was all one farm, a boy about your age disappeared while out playing with his dog. They found the dog, a collie, at the edge of the road, apparently hit by a truck. They scoured the farm and the fields and the woods, but they couldn't find the boy. Then a year or so later, they heard a dog in the fields that sounded just like the one that had been hit by the car. They followed the noise and they found an old well...and at the bottom of it, they found the boy's body. He'd fallen in and drowned."

She looked gravely at Alyson. "His name was Tim."

Alyson swallowed. "Was he wearing a red striped shirt, tan shorts and sneakers?" she asked, barely above a whisper.

Her mother nodded. "That's what Mrs. Warner said. She actually knew the boy."

"I met a ghost?" Alyson's voice squeaked on the last word.

Her mother nodded again. "It would seem so."

"Cool!"

**Author's Note:**

> I wrote this about a decade ago, for a writing group assignment for ghosts or Halloween or wells or something. While it is technically Lassie fan fic, if I had tagged it as such, or tagged it for ghosts, that would have pretty much given things away to begin with, even though I think it's all pretty well telegraphed from the get-go. So please forgive me for not doing so.


End file.
